Question about ISO filesystems and CD-R's

[Ian Smith]

On Tue, 2 Nov 2004, Jonathon McKitrick wrote:

 > On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 12:39:00AM +1100, Ian Smith wrote:
 > : but you can keep on adding further ISO images to a CD-R (or CD-RW) until
 > : it's full, using mkisofs + burncd at least.  Very handy here for certain
 > : types of backups, especially on a remote box visited weekly.
 > 
 > Ah, that's exactly what I'm looking for.  I bought a bunch of those
 > mini-CD-R's, thinking I didn't want to waste a regular CD-R to backup 100
 > megs of my laptop files.  But if I can keep dumping iso's from mkisofs onto
 > the same CD-R, effectively erasing it and adding a new one and just taking
 > up more space cumulatively, then I can keep the CD-R in the drive, run
 > backups every week, and only replace it when it is full, right?

Right, except it doesn't 'effectively erase' existing files on the CD-R; 
all of the files added to each session appear when you mount it.  Hmm, I
think I've only ever appended unique files so far; I suppose that the
latest version of any duplicate pathname would be what you'd get back,
but you might want to confirm that assumption.

 > : My cdappend script's full of paranoid parameter and error checking and
 > : such, but is based on this simple and likely more illustrative one: 
 > 
 > Thanks for the script.  I'll put it to good use.

No worries.  I'll mail you my larger, more paranoid version offlist.

Cheers, Ian